sarma

Like most of James Cunningham's jig-saw puzzle dance(s), "Dancing with Maisie Paradocks" is indeed a maze strewn with paradoxes; although it doesn't lack for signposts, they invariably point in the wrong (right) direction. If "Maisie Paradocks" were a cartoon, the balloon over Little Orphan Annie's head would bristle with Red Ryder's words, and vice versa. The dance has some of the wild charm of Cunningham's early pieces and lots of the glossier wit of his more recent ones. He again presents the theme that meanders and romps and storms through most of his work -scrambling and unscrambling the message so dexterously and so continuously that it decodes itself easily in your brain. You could probably cram on "Maisie Paradocks" and pass a course in Cunningham Fundamentals.

Cunningham (paradoxically) appears to believe in the mystic male-female principal of Indian philosophy while railing at customs that decree one kind of behavior for men (biological males, that is) and another for women. A wisely innocent litany whispers through his works: we are all compounded of dark and light, of air and earth; we are the lamb and the lion that devours it; aren't we all "male" at times, "female" at others? So Cunningham and the dancers who work with him scamper and glide through his big, bright, occasionally self-conscious works -mixing and mismatching the sexes with childlike intentness. They put on costumes and masks that are as direct in their messages as signposts; they play scenes -talking or singing or dancing, or all three. The transformations never stop.

"Maisie", like most Cunningham dances, begins with a rite: the performers, dressed in white tunics, sit in a circle and hum. Later, pairs of dancers in white (whoever's not busy) swoop on from time to time like helpful angels to revive the fallen and assist them offstage. (The dance is full of battles.) A tall figure in orange pajamas, wearing a tiger mask and carrying a parasol slinks on. "I am Shiva", a taped voice intones quietly. But the scenes that this aggressive, sunny deity issues in are all pied. An insistently romping golden girl (it was Linda Tarnay under the tiger mask) tries to vamp a scuttling businessman who has the head of a rabbit (Ted Striggles). He shoots her. Cunningham appears as an untidy, dreamy Bride. Shadowy men whom she clings to absent-mindedly drop unnoticed as, in a brilliant monologue, she/he recalls a childhood of movie-going spent in love with Lassie. Inept yelps from the top of the aisle. Lauren Persichetti scampers down to the stage in her collie suit. Man as Bride and Woman as Dog laugh and dance and make love in a tangle of fur and net. Next a tough little girl in a baseball suit (Barbara Ellman) collapses when the bicycle she's riding is hit by a car (crashing noises, flashing lights).

Shakti (female, dark, moon, etc.) with her frog head turns into Ted Striggles in military uniform, lunging and hissing, facing a thousand enemies, stuttering "trained to kill" even as he is clearly running down. His collapse onto a chair begins an hilarious parody of "Specter of the Rose" with the soldier as the dreamer and Cunningham as a winsome and scantily clad Carnation. However, he/she wears a fetchingly matronly cap and dexterously folds the soldier's socks into a ball before enticing him to barefoot revels. This ends sadly; at the drop of a leap, the soldier is back in his expectant crouch, and the specter flies away (out the window, of course.) Striggles turns back into the businessman, now a lecher in droopy BVDs. Looking like an unfunny Groucho Marx, he chases a large, helpless Playboy bunny (Tarnay again). She is rescued, whether she wants to be or not, by Wonder Woman (Ellman) who leads all the women into battle against businessman, the male-chauvanist sheriff (William Holcomb), and a tiny mustachioed strongman who turns out to be Lauren Persichetti. In typical Cunningham fashion, the silliness, the ferocity, and the shreds of plot dissolve into a light-footed dance; the dancers look sweet and easy and at home in their bodies. Both adroit and childlike in his dancethinking, Cunningham pulls the sticks and straw from our familiar scarecrows and prances on the debris. He's still afraid of the empty clothes though, and so are we.